


A Drum From the South

by paperiuni



Category: Chì bì | Red Cliff (2008)
Genre: Assassination Attempt(s), Duty and Love, Egregious Fruit Symbolism, Film Canon Only, Gen, Historical References, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 08:37:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: In what would turn out to be the final years of the dynasty, though he did not know it then, Zhou Yu, general to the Duke of Wu, had a misadventure.Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang meet again in unlikely circumstances, and proceed to complicate them some more.





	A Drum From the South

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gentlezombie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlezombie/gifts).



> Darling recipient: I hope you enjoy this morsel of a reunion! Have a lovely Yule!
> 
> Dear _Three Kingdoms_ readers: I have one thing to say in my defense, and that is: _movie canon only_. This story exists in some timeline where the Liu–Sun alliance eventually breaks, but Zhou Yu is conveniently alive for longer than two years after the battle of Red Cliff. Go with it.
> 
> Note: Sun Ce, who isn't named in _Red Cliff_ itself, was the older brother of Sun Quan, and Zhou Yu's sworn brother.

In what would turn out to be the final years of the dynasty, though he did not know it then, Zhou Yu, general to the Duke of Wu, had a misadventure.

He was riding home from a minor expedition to the north. This was before the dreams of the young Southland duke swelled with conquest. A fragile peace, born of the gilt victory at Red Cliff and about to be cemented with a marriage, lay between the three emerging kingdoms. The Han empire shook, awaiting the next groundswell.

The weather thwarted the general in the hills north of the Yangtze River. He and his modest entourage had meant to follow the emperors' road to a crossing, but a mudslide diverted them onto a track that wound its way along ruined fields, fallow and flowering, through a village long deserted, and to a temple on top of a bluff.

Thick cypresses framed the twisting upward path. Nightfall revealed the fires of a new village in the next valley to the west, where the people had circled as if along the rim of a wheel with the temple as its hub. The path was made soft by rain, and horses and people had passed there today.

Zhou Yu left most of his men to camp on the downwind side of the hill and went up the sparse stone steps with a small guard. There was peace, and the place was remote, but he was no fool.

Centuries of rain had smoothed the stone animals at the gate into round, dreamlike forms. He bowed to them, old spirits of the hills, out of courtesy, and to the monk who came to greet him, out of the same.

He could have gone to join his soldiers, but a roof overhead and hot water after a day's muddy riding will do much to salve a man's spirit. Some silver from the hand of a grateful traveller will do much to sustain a secluded country shrine.

As he led his mount to the shelter leaning against an outbuilding, a red horse ambled up from the drizzle. She was young and finely made, with sleek flanks and wet, gentle eyes that would have made his wife smile. She drank noisily from the trough while he tended to his own horse.

He thought to ask the monk about the mare, but met no one. A bath had been made in the bath-house, with a pail of well water for washing and hemp cloth for drying.

Returning from the bath, he heard the thrum of strings. The music came from some hidden veranda of the ramshackle temple, whose confines held a handful of tiny courtyards and gardens. The sound of the _guqin_ surrounded him as the night mist did the hilltop, and the capricious notes followed him inside.

The evening meal was humble, but it was worldly, and he glad of that.

"You have another guest," he said to the acolyte who'd brought him the millet and vegetables. "Or does your master play the _guqin_?"

The acolyte bowed before he spoke. "It's my master's _guqin_ , but it is the sage who plays, my lord. We are not to speak to him. It's said he's contemplating immortality."

"I see," said the General of Wu to this.

A damp wind blew from the veranda. Beyond it the peach trees twisted in the garden, heavy with fruit, like they too bore secrets they hankered to share.

Zhou Yu sent the acolyte off with the supper tray and shut the sliding door. He put one of his men to watch beside it, a second under the stairs to his borrowed room, and a third, the one with the keenest eyes, out above the gates with a bow. Then he went to his simple bed on the second floor.

The rain stopped. The last of it sang down the grooved roof tiles and burst over the eaves as the moon emerged, bright as a disc in an official's belt ornament. The trees rustled. Zhou Yu woke in his bed and withdrew the sword the Duke of Wu had bestowed upon him.

Creeping onto the balcony, he moved with the care of a young man at mischief, as he had frequently been, once upon a time.

Now he was a general of the Southland, tested in war and rarefied in the subtler crucibles of guarding the peace. He was kin by oath to the Sun family. Some had deemed him the greatest war leader of these twilight years of the dynasty, one of the last to hold up the glory of the Han.

Right then, Zhou Yu was chiefly grateful that he also remained a warrior of more than passing talent. A shout would've brought his men, but it'd also have alerted his quarry.

The temple was built in the immemorial pattern that walls off the wilderness from the abodes of men. Thus one could follow the covered balconies that overlooked the interlinked courtyards, encountering difficulty only between buildings.

A shadow shifted in the far outer corner of the balcony. The smells of wet earth and half-rotten peach drifted closer. Zhou Yu gauged, with the certainty of a man who sends other men to die upon his calculation, that this was the corner of the house where he'd heard the _guqin_ being played.

The monks trusted the sanctity of their presence and the isolation of the steep hill to protect them. No guard had been posted over the temple before his arrival. A patient intruder might have waited for cover of darkness in the wild-run garden.

A shape, lithe and light-footed, broke from his hiding place and dashed to the doorway. The door slid silently aside as the trespasser entered the room beyond with small, measured steps. His hand went to a fold of his dark, close-wrapped robe.

Zhou Yu did not mean to kill him. He merely meant to wrest the soot-blackened dagger from the intruder's grip, but darkness will foul the grace of any combatant. They struggled back and forth a moment, ungainly and frantic, until Zhou Yu slammed the man against the doorframe, thought to put his sword to his throat, and opened an artery instead. Gurgling, the man fell at his feet.

Inside the room, someone sat up with a gasp and a rustle, brought out of a dream by the noises. There was a spark and a candle lit, illuminating the sleeper. His hair was down, but an alert light came to his eyes at once.

"General Zhou," he said.

"Master Sleeping Dragon," said Zhou Yu. They'd called each other by more familiar names once, but years had passed since then.

He'd wondered when he saw the red mare, and known when he heard the _guqin_. The sight of Zhuge Liang, rising from his bed to set the candle in a lantern, rattled him all the same.

Some paths under Heaven were only meant to cross once, so deep were the marks these meetings clove into a person. Zhou Yu had thought this had been true of the siege at Red Cliff. While their liege lords were at peace, so could he and Zhuge Liang be: content in the knowledge that today, they'd not be tested against each other on a battlefield.

"You killed him," Zhuge Liang said, with the same airiness that Zhou Yu well remembered.

"He'd have killed you." Zhou Yu leaned in for a look at the assassin, whose face was scarred and still. "I've seen him before."

Then the head monk came up, alarmed by the ruckus, and unstrung the moment with his questions. They found the body bereft of personal effects beyond the would-be murder weapon, and then wrapped the body in hemp as was proper. Zhou Yu sent his three men to sweep the temple grounds and reassured the monk that they'd all be gone in the morning and every needful offering to cleanse the blood spilled would be made.

It was past midnight, a round paper lantern like a sunken moon on the veranda between them, before they were left alone. Zhuge Liang had asked for wine and been brought tea. An overripe peach thudded down onto the veranda steps from a drooping branch overhead.

"Tell me." It was more this direct beginning than anything in his expression that betrayed Zhuge Liang's tension. He was fully dressed, in the unassuming garb of a wandering scholar. He'd always favoured a certain simplicity of attire, as if to remind the lords and high officers of Lord Liu's armies that he was a commoner among them.

"If I do, will you also give me the truth? I'd assume you're here to contemplate something less lofty than immortality."

The road was long to Nanyang, where Zhuge Liang had returned to his fields and his scrolls. The road was long to the west, where Lord Liu had settled after the siege. It did not surprise Zhou Yu that Zhuge Liang had chosen to ride it alone, on the good horse Xiao Qiao had gifted to him.

"I was here for a dry place to sleep. Then you cut a man's throat at my doorstep."

Zhou Yu could have argued the accidental nature of that action, but did not. "He'd stained his blade for a stealthy kill. His clothes are common and he has no insignia. He lay hidden under the temple until it was dark, and struck. That is one measure of your fame these days."

It was already whispered that Lord Liu's young strategist was a master of the Way as well as warfare; that he'd conjured the timely wind at Red Cliff rather than read its signs in the skies.

The dead assassin couldn't divulge the hand behind him, but the meaning was clear. Someone meant to sever the dragon's neck before it could rise in flight.

The victory at Red Cliff had seen the formation of a precarious balance of power: Cao Cao to the north, Liu Bei to the west, Sun Quan to the south. Zhuge Liang had proposed this, then seemingly stepped back from the equation, speaking glibly of wheat to be harvested and silkworms to be fed. His return reeked of the promise of war.

"My brother did say to me I should travel with company." A smile played across Zhuge Liang's face, half-hidden by the low light.

What Zhou Yu felt then was both anger and esteem, a frothy, perilous mixture of emotions when he should have been calm. "You're too given to whim for a man who would build an empire."

Zhuge Liang laughed. "Not I. I merely set my wit against the world and see where I can make it give."

"The world," Zhou Yu repeated. "I wonder if you mean Earth or Heaven."

At that, Zhuge Liang fell quiet. Zhou Yu looked at him, this man a decade his junior, too intelligent for the bounds of his world. A man he had admired and still did, too much for anyone's comfort.

"It is men who make emperors, General Zhou," he said at last. "We bend our heads over what the scholars say of the will of Heaven and seldom think to look around at our fellows. But we raise the Son of Heaven from our own earthly ranks."

The favour of Heaven was what it would take to claim the throne of Han. How many claimants were there vying for it at present? The balmy summer night offered no response. Another peach tumbled down, this one round and tawny and whole.

"I can't be certain," said Zhou Yu, "but the killer looks familiar to me. He rode to the court as a messenger from a commandery to the south."

It seemed he had a mind tonight to damn himself with the truth.

"Which commandery?" Again a tremor of frustration plucked at Zhuge Liang's voice. He'd amused himself with the ruse of using another name. The reputation of Master Sleeping Dragon would have preceded him, but meaner aspirants of the Way were as common in the empire as pebbles in a riverbed.

"If he came from the court of Wu, telling you that will be treason." Once Zhou Yu had held out his own sword so he might be beheaded with it, in keeping with martial law, when Zhuge Liang had fulfilled his task and the outcome of Zhou Yu's own had yet been uncertain. A bird had alighted and resolved the dilemma. They had no such answers now.

They both served men who might strive to rule not simply a kingdom, but an empire. Lord Liu had a blood tie to the ruling dynasty. Lord Sun had rich lands and loyal armies at his command, armies that Zhou Yu was sworn to lead into battle against whomever his liege desired to fall.

"If he came from the court of Wu, letting me continue my journey might be the same," said Zhuge Liang. "There is no one to tell you for sure."

It was that audacity, plain in his tone, that still sometimes lit Zhou Yu's dreams like the river on the night they'd broken the siege. He had three steadfast men within shouting distance, and Zhuge Liang was no soldier. It was in Zhou Yu's power to make sure that Liu Bei's shining strategist never reached his lord. That could tip the scales in any conflict to come.

He also remembered how it'd been to make war, to make music, in concert with Zhuge Liang.

"You began this," he said.

"The crumbling of the dynasty? I would see the house of Han restored under the only man who could knit it together again."

Zhou Yu knew what it was to love a liege in this way. Sun Ce had been young, always more a friend than a master, but Zhou Yu had esteemed him as if he were the rising day. Not in silk or silver could you pay for such loyalty.

"You came to Sun Quan with your visions of glory." He'd thought it a good thing. "You tempered him into a soldier."

"If I hadn't, Cao Cao would rule the Southland now."

There was another silence. The highland air tasted strange to Zhou Yu, without the everpresent damp of the river nearby. Zhuge Liang spoke of Heaven as something built by men and women, not a hidden purpose to the world but a truth that could be coaxed and shaped. If that was so, only blind chance had brought them together, at the first beat of a drum pounding for war.

"I will tell my men only what is plain here. That a desperate outlaw came for whatever he could steal from the temple, and I killed him to defend the monks."

"It's a pretty tale." Zhuge Liang composed himself, but he let Zhou Yu see that he did so. "I will be in your debt."

"Deeply," Zhou Yu agreed.

This was what had moved him: if the first meeting clove into one's soul, the second would split it to the marrow. Yet he had wanted the agony of that cut. He'd heard the _guqin_ and followed it, as he had that first time with his own playing.

The moon had set, and only the pale imitation of the lantern remained. The tea cooled, untouched on the tray.

"It's best you go now," Zhou Yu said. "Remember what you said when we last parted. Do not ride that horse into war."

"She has been a fine companion on the road." Zhuge Liang took the lantern. It swayed on the bamboo handle. "I cannot repay you. You know that."

"It would take a greater sage than you to know that." Zhou Yu stood straight as a spear set against a charge.

They would both leave this place. That was as far as he could steer the future, in which the loves of men still had to bend to the demands of duty.

"They already say there is no greater sage alive than I. You should hear the feats of augury that have been pinned on me in these last years."

"I imagine you delighted in stoking those rumours," Zhou Yu said.

He was a general of Wu, risen to high rank by his own merit. If he had a flaw, it lay in a certain willfulness of spirit. Put another way, he had a tender heart beyond the judicious mercy that befits a general. It was through this crack that a dry laugh escaped him.

"The weather I may be able to read," said Zhuge Liang, unflapped by the gibe, "and even the minds of lesser men, when their want is clear. But you, General; you I could only decipher when our thoughts ran as one stream."

He said it quietly, and he did not look at Zhou Yu.

"I thought of you often, when you had left," Zhou Yu said. They'd been brief and burning thoughts, lost in the churn of his days, surfacing only when time lay still and smooth.

It did so now: the rain had passed, and the wind only whispered to the garden trees. The monks had sought their beds for what scant hours there were left before first light.

Zhuge Liang put down the lantern again, went down the steps, and took the peach that had fallen into the grass under the steps. As he turned it over in his hand, Zhou Yu was reminded of the flicks and turns of the fan he'd carried at Red Cliff.

"I would cite to you a history, but I wonder which one would fit." 

The past was the well of all wisdom: what had gone before was set in ink and bamboo, transcribed and annotated and reflected upon. Not to be able to choose a suitable morsel of advice was a rare confession for a scholar of Zhuge Liang's renown. It went to Zhou Yu's heart as a crooked needle of hope, for his own difficulty was of a kind. The confines of their world did not allow for what he wanted to be in that moment, but he could not quash the wanting.

"There is time before dawn," he said. "I've been told I have a fair head for the classics, for a soldier."

Zhuge Liang sighed a sigh of pleasant defeat, which sounded to Zhou Yu a strange thing, but not the strangest the night had brought. "If you offer as a friend, how may I refuse?"

"Shall we think of a precedent?"

"I may have thought of one to suit my previous dilemma," said Zhuge Liang, and broke the peach in two with a tug of his thumbs. It was ripe and sweet, and parted easily. "We might always contemplate it further."

Zhou Yu held out his hand. The fruit, divided, stained his fingers.

**Author's Note:**

> My profuse thanks to Joan for a sharp last-minute lookover. All mistakes left are mine alone.


End file.
